Soundtrack: Post Pop Depression - Paraguay
I haven't wanted to write much in the last week.
Seemingly every single person on Earth with a blog has tried to drill down into what happened on November 5 — to find the people to blame, to somehow explain what could've been done differently, by whom, and why so many actions led to a result that will overwhelmingly harm women, minorities, immigrants, LGBTQ people, and lower-income workers. It's a terrifying time.
I feel woefully unequipped to respond to the moment. I don't have any real answers. I am not a political analyst, and I would feel disingenuous dissecting the Harris (or Trump) campaigns, because I feel like this has been the Dunning-Kruger Olympics for takes, where pundits compete to rationalize and intellectualize events in an attempt to ward off the very thing that has buried us in red: a shared powerlessness and desperation.
People don't trust authority, and yes, it is ironic that this often leads them toward authoritarian figures.
Legacy media — while oftentimes staffed by people that truly love their readers, care about their beats and write like their lives depend upon it — is weighed down by a hysterical attachment to the imaginary concept of objectivity and “the will of the markets.”
Case in point: Regular people have spent years watching the price of goods increase "due to inflation," despite the fact that the increase in pricing was mostly driven by — get this — corporations raising prices. Yet some parts of the legacy media spent an alarming amount of time chiding their readers for thinking otherwise, even going against their own reporting as a means of providing "balanced" coverage, insisting again and again that the economy is good, contorting to prove that prices aren't higher even as companies boasted about literally raising their prices. In fact, the media spent years debating with itself whether price gouging was happening, despite years of proof that it was.
People don’t trust authority, and they especially don’t trust the media — especially the legacy media. It probably didn’t help that they implored readers and viewers to ignore what they saw at the supermarket or when at the pump, and the growing hits to their wallets from the daily necessities of life, gaslighting them that everything was fine.
As an aside: I have used the term “legacy media” here repeatedly, but I don’t completely intend for it to come across as a pejorative. Despite my criticisms, there are people in the legacy media doing a good job, reporting the truth, doing the kinds of work that matters and illuminates readers. I read — and pay for — several legacy media outlets, and I think the world is a better place for them existing, despite their flaws.
The problem, as I’ll explain, is the editorial industrial complex, and how those writing about the powerful don’t seem to be able to (or want to) interrogate power. This could be an entire piece by itself, but I don’t think the answer to these failings is to simply discard legacy media entirely, but to implore it to do better and to strive for the values of truth-hunting and truth-telling that once defined the Fourth Estate — and can once again.
To simmer this down, the price of everything has kept increasing as wages stagnated. Simultaneously, businesses spent several years telling workers they were asking for too much and doing too little, telling people they were “quiet quitting” in 2022 (a grotesque term that means “doing the job you are paid to do”), and, a year later, insisting that years of remote work was actually bad because profits didn’t reach the unrealistic expectations set by the post-lockdown boom of 2021. While the majority of people don't work remotely, from talking to the people I know outside of tech or business, there is a genuine sense that the media has allied itself with the bosses, and I imagine it's because of the many articles that literally call workers lazy.
Yet, when it comes to the powerful, the criticisms feel so much more guarded. Despite the fact that Elon Musk has spent years telegraphing his intent to use his billions of dollars to wield power equivalent to that of a nation state, too much of the media — both legacy and otherwise — responded slowly, cautiously, failing to call him a liar, a con artist, an aggressor, a manipulator, and a racist. Sure, they reported stories that might make you think that, but the desperation to guard objectivity was (and is) such that there is never any intent to call Musk what he was (and is) — a racist billionaire using his outsized capital to bend society to his will.
The news — at least outside of the right wing media terrordome — is always separated from opinion, always guarded, always safe, for fear that they might piss off somebody and be declared "biased," something that happens anyway. While there are columnists that are given some space to have their own thoughts in the newspaper, the stories themselves are delivered with the kind of reserved "hmmm..." tone that often fails to express the consequences of the news itself and lacks the context necessary to deliver the news itself.
This isn't to say these outlets are incapable of doing this right — The Washington Post has done an excellent job of analysis in tech, for example — but that they are custom-built to be bulldozed by authoritarianism, a force that exists to crush those desperately attached to norms and objectivity. Authoritarians know that their ideologically-charged words will be quoted ad verbatim with the occasional "this could mean..." context that's lost in a headline that repeats exactly what they wanted it to.
We rarely explain the structures of our democracy in ways that let people see how to interact with it, which leaves it instead in the hands of special interests who can bankroll their perspectives, even when they’re actively harmful.
...Little of the gravity of what we’re facing makes it into everyday news coverage in a way that would allow us to have real conversations as a country on how to chart a way forward. Instead, each day, we as an industry — to borrow from John Nichols and Robert McChesney’s book Tragedy and Farce — pummel people with facts, but not the context to make sense of them.
Musk is the most brutal example. Despite turning Twitter into a website pumped full of racism and hatred that helped make Donald Trump president, Musk was still able to get mostly-positive coverage from the majority of the mainstream media despite the fact that he has spent the best part of a decade lying about what Tesla will do next. It doesn't matter that these outlets had accompanying coverage that suggested that the markets weren't impressed by its robotaxi plans, or its potemkin robots — Musk is still demonstrably able to use the media's desperation for objectivity against them, knowing that they would never dare combine thinking about stuff with reporting on stuff for fear that someone might say they have "bias" in their "coverage."
This is, by the way, not always the fault of the writers. There are entire foundations of editors that have more faith in the markets and the powerful than they do in the people who spend their days interrogating them, and above them entire editorial superstructures that exist to make sure that the "editorial vision" never colors too far outside the lines. I'm not even talking about Jeff Bezos, or Laurene Powell Jobs, or any number of billionaires who own any number of publications, but the editors editing business and tech reporters who don't know anything about business and tech, or the senior editors that are terrified of any byline that might dare get the outlet "under fire" from somebody who could call their boss.
There are, however, also those who simply defer to the powerful — that assume that "this much money can't be wrong," even if said money has been wrong repeatedly to the point that there's an entire website about it. They are the people that look at the current crop of powerful tech companies that have failed to deliver any truly meaningful innovation in years and coo like newborn babes. Look at the coverage of Sam Altman from the last year — you know, the guy who has spent years lying about what artificial intelligence can do — and tell me why every single thought he has must be uncritically cataloged, his every decision applauded, his every claim trumpeted as certain, his brittle company's obvious problems apologized for and readers reassured of his obvious victory.
Nowhere is this more obvious right now than in The Guardian's nonsensical decision to abandon Twitter, decrying how "X is a toxic media platform and that its owner, Elon Musk, has been able to use its influence to shape political discourse" mere weeks after printing, bereft of context, Elon Musk's ridiculous lies about his plans for cybertaxis. There is little moral quality to leaving X if your outlet continues to act as a stenographer for its leader, and this in fact suggests a lack of any real interest in change or progress, just the paper tiger of norms and values that will only end up depriving people of good journalism.
On the other side of the tracks, Sam Altman is a liar who's been fired from two companies, including OpenAI, and yet because he's a billionaire with a buzzy company, he's left unscathed. The powerful get a completely different set of rules to live by and exist in a totally different media environment — they're geniuses, entrepreneurs and firebrands, their challenges framed as "missteps" and their victories framed as certainties by the same outlets that told us that we were "quiet quitting" and that the economy is actually good and we are the problem. While it's correct to suggest that the right wing is horrendously ideologically biased, it's very hard to look at the rest of the media and claim they're not.
While it might feel a little tangential to bring technology into this, everybody is affected by the growth-at-all-costs Rot Economy, because everybody is using technology, all the time, and the technology in question is getting worse. This election cycle saw more than 25 billion text messages sent to potential voters, and seemingly every website was crammed full of random election advertising.
Our phones are beset with notifications trying to "growth-hack" us into doing things that companies want, our apps full of microtransactions, our websites slower and harder-to-use with endless demands of our emails and our phone numbers and the need to log back in because they couldn't possibly lose a dollar to somebody who dared to consume their content for free. Our social networks are so algorithmically charged that they barely show us the things we want them to anymore, with executives dedicated to filling our feeds with AI-generated slop because despite being the customer, we are also the revenue mechanism. Our search engines do less as a means of making us use them more, our dating apps have become vehicles for private equity to add a toll to falling in love, our video games are constantly nagging us to give them more money, and despite it costing money and being attached to our account, we don't actually own any of the streaming media we purchase. We're drowning in spam — both in our emails and on our phones — and at this point in our lives we're probably agreed to 3 million pages worth of privacy policies allowing companies to use our information as they see fit.
And these are issues that hit everything we do, all the time, constantly, unrelentingly. Technology is our lives now. We wake up, we use our phone, we check our texts (three spam calls, two spam texts), we look at our bank balance (two-factor authentication check), we read the news (a quarter of the page is blocked by an advertisement asking for our email that's deliberately built to hide the button to get rid of it, or a login screen because we got logged out somehow), we check social media (after being shown an ad every two clicks), and then we log onto Slack (and feel a pang of anxiety as 15 different notifications appear).
Modern existence has become engulfed in sludge, the institutions that exist to cut through it bouncing between the ignorance of their masters and a misplaced duty in objectivity, our mechanisms for exploring and enjoying the world interfered with by powerful forces that are too-often left unchecked. Opening our devices is willfully subjecting us to attack after attack from applications, websites and devices that are built to make us do things rather than operate with the dignity and freedom that much of the internet was founded upon.
These millions of invisible acts of terror are too-often left undiscussed, because accepting the truth requires you to accept that most of the tech ecosystem is rotten, and that billions of dollars are made harassing and punishing billions of people every single day of their lives through the devices that we’re required to use to exist in the modern world. Most users suffer the consequences, and most media fails to account for them, and in turn people walk around knowing something is wrong but not knowing who to blame until somebody provides a convenient excuse.
Why wouldn't people crave change? Why wouldn't people be angry? Living in the current world can be absolutely fucking miserable, bereft of industry and filthy with manipulation, an undignified existence, a disrespectful existence that must be crushed if we want to escape the depressing world we've found ourselves in. Our media institutions are fully fucking capable of dealing with these problems, but it starts with actually evaluating them and aggressively interrogating them without fearing accusations of bias that will happen either way.
The truth is that the media is more afraid of bias than they are of misleading their readers. And while that seems like a slippery slope, and may very well be one, there must be room to inject the writer’s voice back into their work, and a willingness to call out bad actors as such, no matter how rich they are, no matter how big their products are, and no matter how willing they are to bark and scream that things are unfair as they accumulate more power.
If you're in the tech industry and reading this and saying that "the media is too critical" of tech, you are flat fucking wrong. Everything we're seeing happening right now is a direct result of a society that let technology and the ultra-rich run rampant, free of both the governmental guardrails that might have stopped them and the media ecosystem that might have held them accountable.
Our default position in interrogating the intentions and actions of the tech industry has become that they will "work it out" as they continually redefine "work it out" as "make their products worse but more profitable." Covering Meta, Twitter, Google, OpenAI and other huge tech companies as if the products they make are remarkable and perfect is disrespectful to readers and a disgusting abdication of responsibility, as their products are, even when they're functional, significantly worse, more annoying, more frustrating and more convoluted than ever, and that's before you get to the ones like Facebook and Instagram that are outright broken.
I don't give a shit if these people have "raised a lot of money," unless you use that as proof that something is fundamentally wrong with the tech industry. Meta making billions of dollars of profit is a sign of something wrong with society, not proof that it’s a "good company" or anything that should grant Mark Zuckerberg any kind of special treatment. OpenAI being "worth" $157 billion for a company that burns $5 billion or more a year to make a product that destroys our environment for a product yet to find any real meaning isn't a sign that it should get more coverage or be taken more seriously. Whatever you may feel about ChatGPT, the coverage it receives is outsized compared to its actual utility and the things built on top of it, and that's a direct result of a media industry that seems incapable of holding the powerful accountable.
It's time to accept that most people's digital life fucking sucks, as does the way we consume our information, and that there are people directly responsible. Be as angry as you want at Jeff Bezos, whose wealth (and the inherent cruelty of Amazon’s labor practices, and the growing enshittification of Amazon itself) makes him an obvious target, but don’t forget Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Sundar Pichai, Tim Cook and every single other tech executive that has allowed our digital experiences to become rotted out husks dominated by algorithms. These companies are not bound by civic duty, or even a duty to their customers — they have made their monopolies, and they’ll do whatever keeps you trapped in them. If they want me to think otherwise, they should prove it, and the media should stop trying to prove it for them.
Similarly, governments have entirely failed to push through any legislation that might stymie the rot, both in terms of the dominance (and opaqueness) of algorithmic manipulation and the ways in which tech products exist with few real quality standards. We may have (at least for now) consumer standards for the majority of consumer goods, but software is left effectively untouched, which is why so much of our digital lives is such unfettered dogshit.
And if you're reading this and saying I'm being a hater or pessimist, shut the fuck up. I'm so fucking tired of being told to calm down about this as we stare down the barrel of four years of authoritarianism built on top of the decay of our lives (both physical and digital), with a media ecosystem that doesn't do a great job of explaining what's being done to people in an ideologically consistent way. I'm angry, and I don't know why you're not. Explain it to me. Email me. Explain yourself, explain why you do not see the state of our digital lives as one of outright decay and rot, one that robs users of dignity and industry, one that actively harms billions of people in pursuit of greed.
There is an extremely-common assumption in the tech media — based on what, I'm not sure — that these companies are all doing a good job, and that "good job" means having lots of users and making lots of money, and it drives editorial decision-making.
If three-quarters of the biggest car manufacturers were making record profits by making half of their cars with a brake that sometimes doesn't work, it'd be international news, leading to government inquiries and people being put in prison. This isn’t conjecture. After Volkswagen was caught deliberately programming its engines to only meet emissions standards during laboratory testing and certification, lawmakers around the globe responded with civil and criminal action. The executives and engineers responsible were indicted, with one receiving seven years in jail. Its former CEO is currently being tried in Germany, and has been indicted in the US.
And yet so much of the tech industry — consumer software like Google, Facebook, Twitter, and even ChatGPT, and business software from companies like Microsoft and Slack — outright sucks, yet gets covered as if that's just "how things are." Meta, by the admission of its own internal documents, makes products that are ruinous to the mental health of teenage girls. And it hasn’t made any substantial changes. Nor has it received any significant pushback for failing to do so. It exercises a reckless disregard for public safety as the auto industry in the 1960s, when Ralph Nader wrote “Unsafe At Any Speed.”
Nader’s book actually brought about change. It led to the Department of Transport, and the passage of seat belt laws in 49 states, and a bunch of other things that get overlooked (and possibly because he led to eight years of George W. Bush as president). But the tech industry is somehow inoculated against any kind of public pressure or shame, because it operates by a completely different rule book and a different criteria for success, as well as a different set of expectations. By allowing the market to become disconnected from the value it creates, we enable companies like NVIDIA that reduce the quality of their services as they make more money, or Facebook destroying our political discourse or facilitating a genocide in Myanmar, and then celebrate them because, well, they made more money. No, really, that’s quite literally what now-CTO Andrew Bosworth said in an internal memo from 2016, where he said that “all the work [Facebook does] in growth is justified,” even if that includes — and I am quoting him directly — “somebody dying in a terrorist attack coordinated [using Facebook’s tools.]”
The mere mention of violent crime is enough to create reams of articles questioning whether society is safe, yet our digital lives are a wasteland that many still discuss like a utopia. Seriously, putting aside the social networks, have you visited a website on a phone recently? Have you tried to use an app? Have you tried to buy something online starting with a Google Search? Within those experiences, has anything gone wrong? I know it has! You know it has! It's time to wake up!
We — users of products — are at war with the products we’re using and the people that make them. And right now, we’re losing.
The media must realign to fight for how things should be. This doesn't mean that they can't cover things positively, or give credit where credit is due, or be willing to accept what something could be, but what has to change is the evaluation of the products themselves, which have been allowed to decay to a level that has become at best annoying and at worst actively harmful to society.
Our networks are rotten, our information ecosystem poisoned with its pure parts ideologically and strategically concussed, our means of speaking to those we love and making new connections so constantly interfered-with that personal choice and dignity is all but removed.
But there is hope. Those covering the tech industry have one of the most consequential jobs in journalism, if they choose to heed the call. Those willing to guide people through the wasteland — those willing to discuss what needs to change, how bad things have gotten, and what good might look like — have the opportunity to push for a better future by spitting in the faces of those ruining it.
I don’t know where I sit, what title to give myself, if I am legacy (I got my start writing for a print magazine) or independent or an “influencer” or a “content creator,” and I’m not sure I care. All I know is that I feel like I am at war, and we — if I can be considered part of the media — are at war with people that have changed the terms of innovation so that it’s synonymous with value extraction. Technology is how I became a person, how I met my closest friends and loved ones, and without it I would not be able to write, let alone be able to write this newsletter, and I feel poison flow through my veins as I see what these motherfuckers have done and what they will continue to do if they’re not consistently and vigorously interrogated.
Now is the time to talk bluntly about what’s happening. The declining quality of these products, the scourge of growth-hacking, the cancerous growth-at-all-costs mindset, these are all things that need to be raised in every single piece, and judgments must be unrelenting. The companies will squeal that they are being unfairly treated by “biased legacy media,” something which (as I’ve said repeatedly) is already happening.
These companies are poisoning the digital world, and they must be held accountable for the damage they are causing. Readers are already aware, but are — with the help of some members of the media — gaslighting themselves into believing that they “just don’t get it,” when the thing they don’t get is that the tech industry has built legions of obfuscations, legal tricks, and horrifying user interface traps with the intention of making the customer believe they’re the problem.
Things can change, but it has to start with the information sources, and that starts with journalism. The work has already begun, and will continue, but must scale up, and do so quickly.
And you, the user, have power too. Learn to read a privacy policy (yes, there are plenty of people in the tech media who give a shit, the Post has several of them, Bezos be damned). Move to Signal, an encrypted messaging app that works on just about everything. Get a service like DeleteMe (I pay for it, I worked for them like 4 years ago, I have no financial relationship with them) to remove yourself from data brokers. Molly White, a wonderful friend and even better writer, has written an extremely long guide about what to do next, and it runs through a ton of great things you can do — unionization, finding your communities, dropping apps that collect and store sensitive data, and so on.I also recommend WIRED’s guide to protecting yourself from government surveillance.
I'll leave you with a thought I posted on the Better Offline Reddit on November 6.
The last 24 hours things have felt bleak, and will likely feel more bleak as the months and years go on. It will be easy to give into doom, to assume the fight is lost, to assume that the bad guys have permanently won and there will never be the justice or joy we deserve.
Now is the time for solidarity, to crystalize around the ideas that matter, even if their position in society is delayed, even as the clouds darken and the storms brew and the darkness feels all-encompassing and suffocating. Reach out to those you love, and don't just commiserate - plan. It doesn't have to be political. It doesn't even really have to matter. Put shit on your fucking calendar, keep yourself active, and busy, and if not distracted, at the very least animated. Darkness feasts on idleness. Darkness feasts on a sense of failure, and a sense of inability to make change.
You don't know me well, but know that I am aware of the darkness, and the sadness, and the suffocation of when things feel overwhelming. Give yourself mercy today, and in the days to come, and don't castigate yourself for feeling gutted.
Then keep going. I realize it's little solace to think "well if I keep saying stuff out loud things will get better," but I promise you doing so has an effect, and actually matters. Keep talking about how fucked things are. Make sure it's written down. Make sure it's spoken cleanly, and with rage and fire and piss and vinegar. Things will change for the better, even if it takes more time than it should.
